From the collection
Carrel
No. 023
A carrel is a private desk in a library, and that is the whole design brief: no accounts, no sharing, no dashboard. One reader, seven thousand books, and an interface that gets out of the way. Built on calibre-web, it has since become a different program.
There is no login. Rather than strip out authentication and fight every future rebase, a thirty-line shim authenticates the owner on each request, so upstream’s 154 @login_required decorators pass untouched and the credential routes simply answer 404. metadata.db is attached read-only at the connection level, so the web layer cannot write to the library even by accident.
The search bar speaks Calibre. Upstream has no expression grammar at all: it lowercases the term and hands it to FTS5 as a phrase, so author:"King" searched for that literal string and returned nothing. Carrel evaluates through CalibreQuarry’s stdlib port of Calibre’s parser (No. 006), and the numbers invert: 0 to 55 for that query, 0 to 1368 for tags:Fic.Fantasy, 0 to 244 for a custom column. Field prefixes, boolean logic, hierarchical tags and virtual-library references all behave as they do in Calibre.
Wings surface Calibre’s virtual libraries as browse sections through that same engine, so the sidebar and a vl: search can never disagree. A category browser walks the library’s dot taxonomy, synthesising the intermediate nodes because only leaves are assigned, and Ctrl-K fuzzy-jumps to any of 6,975 destinations, falling through to a search when what you typed is not one.
The theme stopped being a theme. caliBlur is gone and the stylesheet is owned outright: ledger hairlines instead of cards, serif for prose and mono for every label and count. One measurement shaped the statistics surfaces more than any taste decision. Kanagawa fails as a categorical chart palette, measurably: the worst adjacent accent pair sits at ΔE 6.7 for normal vision, before colour blindness is considered. So magnitude rides a single sequential ramp and identity is carried by position and a label. The constraint pushed the design further toward the ledger idiom.